Merry Christmas. Or not. Whatever winter holiday you celebrate, you probably do it by substituting love and kindness with cheap plastic garbage wrapped in pretty paper. And if you're like us, you find it distracting to put too much thought into what to buy your loved ones. Each year we try to solve that problem by HARNESSING THE AWESOME POWER OF GAWKER MEDIA'S PROPRIETARY PUBLISHING PLATFORM, KINJA, to gather the best gift suggestions the internet has to offer. This year, we've divided the universe of potential gift recipients into readers of our Gawker Media brother and sister sites—I mean, we're all surrounded by Jezebel and Deadspin and Lifehacker types, right? We begin with Kotaku: What should you buy for the nerd gaming person in your life?

We're always hearing of new creative uses for drones, but this has got to be one of the better ones: Four people in Calhoun County, Georgia have been accused of using a mini helicopter to smuggle contraband tobacco into a prison.

We hear a lot about how valuable our personal information in the age of social networking. There are all these tools to help us calculate how much our Twitter account is "worth" and movements to get Facebook to pay for our data. But, it turns out, our personal information is just worth pennies to the largest data-collection companies.

Ross Ulbricht, the 30-year-old California geek accused of running the massive underground drug market Silk Road, was logged into Silk Road's customer support control panel the moment he was arrested in a San Francisco public library, according to new court documents filed federal prosecutors. And there are the screenshots to prove it.

We live in a strange world. Thanks to the internet's multifaceted infostream, time, formerly arrow-straight, has wrapped around itself like a Hot Wheels track which now, unfortunately, has sent the miniature muscle car of history careening back to the 80s.

Bad news for anyone planning their holiday vacation in North Korea (and there are some!) The U.S. State Department has warned U.S. citizens from traveling to North Korea, amid reports that an 85-year-old man has been detained by North Korea.

In the aftermath of the shuttering of the notorious black market Silk Road, the race has been on to fill the multi-million dollar hole left in the underground online drug trade. One of the most established of these sites is Black Market Reloaded, where thousands of users trade drugs anonymously—they think. But here's some bad news for Black Market buyers and sellers: Black Market Reloaded has experienced a serious security breach, which allowed BBC journalists to easily identity a number of buyers and sellers on the site.

The four-story brownstone at 141 East 37th Street in Manhattan has no remarkable features: a plain building on a quiet tree-lined street in the shadow of the Empire State Building. In the summer of 1920, Herbert O. Yardley, a government codebreaker, moved in with a gang of math geniuses and began deciphering intercepted Japanese diplomatic telegrams. This was the Black Chamber, America's first civilian code-breaking agency. From this was born the American surveillance state, and eventually the sprawling National Security Agency, which you may have heard about recently.

Each year Gawker Media asks writers to review their own job performance as part of a conceptual art project about the impossibility of self-awareness. In the spirit of Gawker Media's new community collaboration platform Kinja™, I want to hear from you. How do you feel I am doing in my job? What do you think are my greatest strengths? What do you think are my greatest weaknesses? (Please do this ASAP because I am already like a week late on this and I may be fired!)

There was a time—early 2012?—when memes were "cool," and "funny." In those days, I often laughed at the memes when I came across them in my browsing, sharing them with friends via Twitter or Facebook, and even posting them on Gawker.com.

It's an internet law that any new social media technology will instantly be used to buy and sell drugs. I've come across allegations of drug trades on Facebook, Topix, Craigslist, and, of course various Dark Net forums like Silk Road. Now Instagram is in the spotlight for apparently being a hotbed of artfully-filtered drug trafficking.

Ross Ulbricht, alleged founder of the online drug market Silk Road, appeared briefly in court today for the first time since being transferred to New York City. According to Forbes' Andy Greenberg, he didn't say much, but his lawyer Joshua Dratel told reporters that Ulbricht wasn't Dread Pirate Roberts, the pseudonym used by the drug lord behind Silk Road "The evidence can't establish that he is who they say he is, or that he's done what they say he's done."

What happens when the garbled datastream of a fax machine is transcribed by one of those increasingly popular voice-to-text services? Web developer E.J. Brennan says this is what was produced when a fax machine called his number and left a voicemail on Twilio, which offers automatic transcription service.

During his six years as a U.S. Air Force drone sensor operator, 27-year-old Brandon Bryant helped kill, by his estimation, 1,626 people in combat, mostly from bases in the U.S., thousands of miles away from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. Years later, he's dealing with PTSD and speaking out about the realities of drone warfare. Got a question for Bryant? Ask it at the bottom of the post. Bryant will join us at 2pm EST to answer your questions. [Update: Q + A is done, thanks for stopping by!]

As the head of Facebook, with over one billion active users, Mark Zuckerberg probably has more influence on information technology than any one person alive. Now a couple of information scholars have archived his every public utterance into a massive archive they're calling the Zuckerberg Files.

The hits keep on coming in the Silk Road takedown. The latest twist in the story of the fall of the biggest drug market on the Dark Net is that one of its best-known dealers was busted and turned informant months ago, according to The Smoking Gun.

It is 2013 and people are still offended by the animated Fox TV show The Simpsons. This week, Governmentattic.org obtained an archive of indecency complaints about the Simpsons to the FCC from 2010-2013, via Freedom of Information Act request, . They are pretty amazing. (There's also an archive of South Park complaints [pdf] but people getting upset about The Simpsons is much funnier.)

Maybe you have seen these ridiculous photos of the rich Serbian bachelor? It seems each year the meme resurfaces like an old rash, and they have been making the rounds again. But now we learn the story behind them may be weirder than they seem. According to Animal New York, the rich Serbian Bachelor is actually an Icelandic cult leader who works at a fastfood restaurant. Update: No, it's not: Animal now says it's got the wrong guy.

Glenn Greenwald, the columnist who brought the world the Ed Snowden Papers, is leaving the Guardian to start his own website. BuzzFeed reports Greenwald, who spent the summer scoring scoop after scoop about the NSA, is starting "a very well-funded… very substantial new media outlet."